A Pragmatic Approach to Scaling Agile in the Enterprise

Agile development has become the norm for building software, with the majority of software delivery teams using some form of Agile development. But the same cannot be said for the enterprises they work for. The reality is that while development teams are embracing Agile methodologies, the software delivery organizations they are part of tend to be the very opposite of Agile.

The truth for large software delivery organizations is often “water-scrum-fall” with Agile teams following a different process and different philosophy from the rest of the organization. But is this a bad thing? Does the entire IT organization need to be Agile to deliver the benefits of Agile development, or do hybrid strategies actually work? Can organizations adopt a DevOps mindset in a hybrid environment? Can agile teams work in a sufficiently disciplined manner so that managers will finally choose to fully embrace Agile?

In this talk, Scott Ambler, author and Agile guru, and Dave West, Chief Product Officer at Tasktop, discuss the reality of Agile development at scale. Join them for practical advice on how organizations can better shape processes to deliver the benefits of Agile while managing the reality of large scale software delivery.

Past Webinars and Podcasts

Driving Requirements into the Lifecycle with Integration – How Tasktop™ Sync Enables IBM® Rational® DOORS® and DOORS NG to Integrate with Non-Rational Tools

It all starts with requirements. Not only do they define the problem you are trying to solve, but also its value. If used correctly, requirements enable you to make decisions about priority, business value, and even architectural risk. But for many organizations requirements live on an island – an island that sends out communications, but increasingly becomes less and less relevant as the project progresses. How many of your requirement documents are still up to date at the end of the project? When there is a problem, where do you look first – the code, the architecture, the tests, the deployment or the requirements documents?

Agile solves this problem by empowering individuals, ‘product owners’, to keep the essence of the requirements in their head to make decisions and drive progress. But for many organizations, the requirements for a system or product are too big to hold in any single person’s head, and maybe your product or system has to be compliant, requiring a documented and traced understanding of the requirements.

Requirements need to be connected to the rest of the lifecycle. They must flow from inception to implementation, and be up to date. To do this requires not just good, modern requirements practices, but also automation. Automation that, in near real-time, synchronizes and links requirements to the other disciplines and integrates requirements into the lifecycle.

Tom Capelle, President, Sodius and Dave West, Chief Product Officer, Tasktop describe how Tasktop Sync can connect IBM Rational DOORS and DOORS Next Generation to the lifecycle of development and beyond. They will define the challenge to modern requirements practice and how automation, combined with modern requirements practices, can build bridges from the island that is requirements to the rest of the lifecycle.

As the union of hardware and software bestows upon the world new innovations that amaze and awe the buying public, the builders behind these creations try to keep the complexity of the products and the processes involved from driving them crazy.

Hardware and software don't play well with each other without a lot of encouragement, and developers are under constant pressure to build and iterate faster. In response, many software teams look to Agile development as a better way to organize work, manage uncertainty and maintain quality.

Tasktop 4.0 Release, Introducing Tasktop Data

Learn more about Tasktop's 4.0 release, including a demonstration of our latest product - Tasktop Data. During this webinar, Mik Kersten, Tasktop's CEO and Co-Founder, and Dave West, Tasktop's Chief Product Officer, provides an overview of the new Sync functionality and discuss how Tasktop Data enables real-time software lifecycle analytics across the projects, domains and tools.

Time to put Security into the Software Development Lifecycle

Information security has been an important topic since the advent of computing, but over the last few years, high-profile security breaches have focused attention on ensuring that web applications and sites are not easy pickings for crackers.

Even though information security is critical, it has remained a separate activity from the software development processes. Why? Because until very recently there has been no way to automatically integrate security into the development process.

In this webinar you hear from both sides of the house with a security expert describing how introducing security into the lifecycle makes sense for the security discipline and Agile developer on why real time security information is crucial for Agile teams and the DevOps process. This webinar describes new ways to secure the software delivery process by connecting security vulnerabilities to defects, stories and the rest of the lifecycle artifacts.

Dave West, Tasktop Chief Product Officer, describes the benefits of an integrated lifecycle for development and how it will improve existing Agile processes and DevOps practices.

Calvin Nguyen, WhiteHat Director of Product Management, approaches the integrated lifecycle from a security domain point of view, highlighting the key benefits to the organization.

Organizations that use these tools to define requirements can now use Agile planning tools (such as JIRA, Rally and VersionOne), and test management tools (such as HP Quality Center) without losing the traceability across requirements, defects or tests. Tasktop Sync 3.6 also expands support for ServiceNow and Rally, and includes updates to a variety of Tasktop connectors.

In this webinar, Dave West, Tasktop Chief product Officer and former Forrester Analyst, and Nicole Bryan, Tasktop Vice President of Product Management, will provide an overview of 3.6 functionality and discuss how this new functionality fits into the bigger DevOps picture and helps address the need for end-to-end traceability in the software delivery process.

The ability to deliver software is a competitive advantage — improving software delivery capacity has a direct material value. Lean startup and Agile methods have taught us that increased feedback and visibility are crucial for improving capacity and adaptability, as well as lowering cost and risk.

But, "if you can't measure it, you can't improve it," and software development -- that unique blend of science and art -- is notoriously difficult to measure. Measurement is not just about incremental improvements; it is also about making the right strategic decisions.

But our customers tell us that design and deployment is extremely challenging. Moving data from software delivery tools to the warehouse requires significant IT resources -- a constant struggle with countless delivery tool specific data access scripts and custom programs that are difficult to maintain and support. And often they don't end up getting what they need, when they need it. What's needed is a single, easily configurable tool that populates the data warehouse with actionable data, in real-time, and without the maintenance burdens. Tasktop Sync for Data is that tool.

In this webinar, we show how our unique bus technology can maximize your measurement capabilities with minimal effort.

The webinar covers the following:

The value of a software delivery data warehouse.

The problems of connecting to the various systems in a complex environment.

When Two Worlds Collide: Using Agile Story Points AND Management Time Tracking

Wednesday, Oct 23rd, 2013

Presented by Nicole Bryan, VP of Product Management at Tasktop

Congratulations, you've successfully adopted Agile methods! You've been at it for six months and you're humming along like a well-oiled machine. You've even scaled to multiple separate agile teams. Your developers are happy and production seems to be up!

And then the dreaded question comes – "We need this feature, how long will it take?" Your answer … "We've estimated that to be about 50 story points." Blank stare.

It's no secret, there are some challenges in trying to marry Agile processes to outside stakeholder needs. For example, Agile teams may prefer to use Story Points as an estimate of the complexity of a story, while business stakeholders generally just want to know how many person-hours a feature will require. Often the PMO is interested in tracking developer time in order to better understand their Return on Investment. But their instructions to use time-tracking tools is met with either simple annoyance our outright disdain.

In this webinar, Nicole explores some of the challenges that arise when marrying Agile processes to outside stakeholder needs. We show you practical ways to make the translation of Agile, to the Rest of the World, as painless as possible – and help show you why it actually helps development teams in the end.

Have you ever wondered how DevOps practices can be applied in your organization? Do you think it's impossible or impractical for your organization? Watch Damon and Dave as they discuss approaches to DevOps in organizations like yours.
For a taste of this awesome live webcast, check out Dave and Damon in action last month on the DevOps panel at xChange13:

Software Lifecycle Integration: How to put "best" into "best-of-breed"

Wednesday, Sept 4th, 2013

Presented by Mik Kersten, Tasktop's Founder and CEO

Software delivery is plagued by disjointed siloes of information spanning software stakeholders and suppliers. Over the years, developers and other members of the software development and delivery team, have influenced the purchase of best-of-breed tools that make them the most productive. The result is an Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tool diversity that has actually undermined the decade-old promise of ALM software helping to unify software delivery teams.

Imagine an integrated fabric that allows information to flow freely, and in real-time, across the stakeholders, tool siloes, and vendor boundaries. We call that visionSoftware Lifecycle Integration (SLI).

When the application development stack became overly complex, the role of the Enterprise Architect became clear, and a new discipline and middleware tool category formed. Just as connecting the back-end services and applications that power our organizations required the creation of an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), the modern software development lifecycle needs a similar category of tools and processes in order to scale the promise of Agile and Lean software delivery. In this webinar, Tasktop CEO and Eclipse Mylyn creator Mik Kersten discussed:

Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) tools such as the market leading CA Clarity PPM are just right for the Project Management Office (PMO).

But when it comes to executing on a software project the development organization will use specialized Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solutions such as HP Quality Center, IBM Rational Team Concert, Microsoft TFS or JIRA. This disconnect between planning and execution impacts both the PMO and development leaving both parties in the dark, or requiring complex, expensive and slow manual processes to compensate.

By connecting PPM with ALM, organizations can get accurate and up to date project status and progress metrics while ensuring development efforts are aligned with corporate goals. Watch this webinar to see how a combination of Software Lifecycle Integration and Agile practices can reduce waste and shorten delivery times.

For many organizations, software delivery is emerging as a key business process, critical to the success of the organization. Yet the software delivery value chain is becoming more complex, even in the face of the call to reduce cycle times. Increased complexity has been introduced by additional deployment venues such as the cloud and mobile, while Agile and Lean process are used to drive cycle times down.

This combination of value, complexity, and speed requires organizations to improve the collaboration among software delivery disciplines by applying a systematic, structured approach to integrating their disparate ALM tools.

This emerging ALM discipline has been labeled “Software Lifecycle Integration” (SLI) and in this talk Dave West, Chief Product Officer at Tasktop and former Forrester analyst, describes why organizations need to think about SLI, and how SLI can be a key tenet in an organization’s desire to improve cycle times, reduce cost, and deliver more value with their software delivery practice.

This webinar will cover the following topics:

The current state of ALM – the promise and the reality

The need for an systematic approach to integration and ALM architecture

For many organizations continuous delivery is both a mandate and mission with the business requiring increased feedback, shorter cycle times and reduced delivery overhead. But continuous delivery is much more than automating the build and release process.

It calls for software delivery to flow from inception to implementation with all groups involved. But that end to end process is often broken with numerous manual processes, process disconnects and poor collaboration. The promise of continuous delivery is lost far before the release and build practices.

This webcast will show how IBM Rational Lifecycle Integration Adapters enable organizations to connect their end to end delivery lifecycle in support of continuous delivery. It will demonstrate how Rational ALM products can be integrated to 3rd party tools allowing a seamless process flow from inception to implementation. This reduces waste and increases cadence allowing the whole delivery organization to be involved in continuous delivery.

Connecting CA Clarity PPM with Development Tool Stacks from IBM, HP, Microsoft and more

Wed May 29th, 2013

Presented by Wesley Coelho, Director of Business Development, and
Robert Elves, co-founder of Tasktop Technologies

For many organizations, CA Clarity PPM is the right tool for managing the big picture of projects and portfolios. A key component of these projects often involves a software development initiative. But when it comes down to executing on a software project, the development organization will use a specialized software project management solution such as HP Quality Center, IBM Rational Team Concert, Microsoft TFS or JIRA.

This can leave business stakeholders clueless as to what's actually happening in the development shop while developers are also left in the dark on changing business priorities.

Join this webinar to learn how to apply Tasktop Sync to engage business stakeholders in the software development activity and provide accurate project status and progress metrics while enabling developers to ensure their software aligns with corporate goals.

This webinar will cover "Partner Inclusion," expanding our integration ecosystem to share ALM artifacts with our partners as we develop new and maintain existing connectors with their tools.

This phase of our journey has proved to be extremely enlightening. Why? Communication is hard enough within a single company. We quickly learned that it is that much harder across companies when you take into consideration confidentiality requirements, process surprises and cross-company cultural differences. But integration is worth the pain, with the resulting connected process not only making delivering software easier, but also building stronger partner relationships.

Email and spreadsheets were historically the tools of choice for cross-organization collaboration. By replacing those tools with Tasktop Sync , we have enabled teams to collaborate more effectively, report statuses quicker and make project decisions in real time. Software delivery is increasingly a cross-organization delivery process with both outsourced development and testing coupled with external service / application integration. Our journey illustrates that it is possible to automate the integration of these ALM processes enabling artifacts to flow across organizational boundaries.

In this webinar, Nicole will discuss Tasktop's internal journey and demo Bugzilla RTC and Mingle Bugzilla to illustrate this progression. By synchronizing data not just across tools, but across organizational boundaries we are able to deliver better software faster and build stronger partner relationships.

Get IBM RTC and HP ALM To Blend Together Like Peanut Butter and Jelly

Wed March 20th, 2013

Presented by Wesley Coelho, Director of Business Development at Tasktop Technologies, and Lance Knight, Director of Solution Architects at Tasktop

Some might consider RTC and HP ALM to be an odd combination of flavors. But in reality, organizations require both solutions on an ongoing basis for optimal software delivery. In some cases, specialized practitioners are most effective using the tools and workflows they've honed for years.

In other cases, acquisitions or the need for control over the software supplier ecosystem make using both HP ALM and IBM RTC necessary.

Software development requires tight collaboration across practitioner roles. However, having information in only HP or IBM means that teams lack visibility, comprehensive reporting, and traceability across their incompatible systems. Tasktop Sync solves these problems by providing instant bi-directional synchronization with the sophisticated enterprise capabilities needed to stick HP QC together with RTC. Furthermore, we see integration patterns emerging that provide simple solutions to common integration scenarios.

Exploiting the Power of Microsoft TFS 2012 with Tasktop Sync

With the release of Visual Studio (VS) 2012, Microsoft continues to demonstrate their investment in enabling software delivery teams and organizations to deliver software faster and in a more predictable fashion.

VS2012 includes major upgrades to Team Foundation Server (TFS) with improved planning, agile team management and collaboration. But for many organizations the power of VS2012 is only available for their developers with other teams using other tools for agile management, testing and requirements.

In this webinar Dave West, Chief Product Officer and Lance Knight, Director of Solutions, will discuss how you can connect TFS into your heterogeneous tools stack, enabling everyone to work from the same project artifacts. By connecting TFS to the whole development tool chain, organizations can take advantage of the planning, collaboration and reporting capabilities provided by TFS 2012 whilst allowing other groups to continue to use their tool of choice. We will also demonstrate a series of integration patterns, showing how TFS can drive development across the whole lifecycle.

Drinking Our Own Champagne: A View into How Tasktop Manages its Own Integration Ecosystem using Tasktop Sync

Ever wonder how Tasktop is able to manage and maintain over 70 ALM connectors from over 20 different vendors? As with most software companies, our “software supply chain” is complex ranging from open source to enterprise software. Each partner has their own development process, release cadence and testing approach and it is very hard to encourage them to change. In fact, we pride ourselves in being flexible on how we build and maintain the myriad of connectors we have so that we can accommodate our partners.

So how do we do it? Well, our story is probably not unlike many others out there…. And it is top of mind, because Tasktop has recently embarked on a journey to evaluate our own integration ecosystem in order to ensure we can support and grow for our next generation of products and connectors. During this evaluation we have learned quite a bit, not only about how to work with different vendors, but how integration can form a currency for collaboration and communication.

In this webinar, Nicole will demonstrate how Tasktop Sync plays such a crucial role in the development of our connector ecosystem and also discuss the human element of software development that, ironically, is exposed precisely because of a back end integration tool.

Watch this webinar recording if you want to learn more about what happens during your company's Tasktop Sync implementation and how it lets you integrate your ALM tools and open your channels of communication in a simple way you've only imagined.

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Analyst Quotes

"The reality is companies have multiple SCM tools, multiple change management tools, etc., and it's difficult to rip those out of organizations. They want integration across their toolset, and Mylyn is a good way to achieve that."

Jeffrey Hammond
Principal Analyst,
Forrester Research

"Tasktop has become the de facto integration layer between the Eclipse IDE and project management tools..."